Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature by Gerald Guinness

Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature by Gerald GuinnessReview by: Faizal ForresterJournal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1 (MAY 1996), pp. 111-121Published by: Journal of West Indian Literature, Department of Literatures in English, University ofthe West IndiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23019898 .

Accessed: 16/01/2015 15:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Journal of West Indian Literature, Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies iscollaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of West Indian Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 69.167.109.125 on Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:07:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jwil

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jwil

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23019898?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature

by Gerald Guinness (Editorial De La Universidad De Puerto Rico, 1993) 204 pp.

As a student of Caribbean literature, I look forward to new publications that discuss and celebrate the contributions of our writers to emerging literatures in English, French and Spanish. The immensity of these con tributions lies in the fact that our writers are engaged in a post-colonialized, artistic resistance to colonial theft and barbarism, one that encompasses several diasporas and diverse histories as well as to an on-going, courageous, re/inventing of what, according to Western literary standards, is known as written "narrative".

How have we appropriated and abrogated the master s tools - his

language, his linguistics - in order to articulate the most private regions of ourselves? How have we transformed these adversarial situations, per

haps, the most precarious of historical "moments", into written "spaces" that reflect all of our regional cross-culturalities and diversities? How do West Indianized narrative forms and structures reflect, like no "outsider" critic or novelist will ever be able to, our very own different racial, spiritual, social and economic conditions? Such questions provide us with the opportunity for urgent and sustaining dialogues between our various communities, countries and nationalities; "places" where we can say what we are and who we are according to what others have traditionally said we can or could be.

These identity making/affirming issues have been addressed critically in at least three compilations from noteworthy teachers and writers of Caribbean literature: Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido; the flawed but useful and provocative, Passion & Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature by Frank

Birbalsingh; and The West Indian Novel and its Background (2nd ed.) by Kenneth Ramchand. What makes these collections invaluable is that these cultural and intellectual workers are not afraid to confront the politicized as well as personalized dimensions of their own respective literatures; and,

although most of them are Western educated, they do not rely on an

Arnoldian, literary praxis founded on the notion of Euro-centric compara tive hierarchies (for example, discussing "High" literature in opposition to "Low" literature) as a fixed method for analysis; there is no need on the part of these critics to prove to any audience that a West Indian writer deser

ves/warrants special merit solely because a novel resembles the

picturesque in Adam Bede; the gothic in Frankenstein; or, the mock-heroic in

Joyce's Ulysses. Empire's artistic "standards" need no longer be utilized as

Vol. 7, No. 1 Ill



a comparative foil with which to discuss our writing: we can now celebrate the richness and greatness of our regional literatures without dragging Shakespeare and Milton into it!

The same, however, cannot be said of Gerald Guinness Here and Else where: Essays on Caribbean Literature. The book's theoretical flaws are evident from the opening Preface; its structural flaws stem from an inability on the

part of the author to provide close, sustained, consistent and organized readings of those texts chosen for discussion. These shortcomings should be immediately obvious to any vigilant reader.

Firstly, there is the issue of Guinness' dangerous substitution of thematic analysis for serious critical practice. His organizing principle, evident in the book's title, is the rather overworked theme of the

"Here/Elsewhere"; a discussion of a familiar post-colonial condition: a

schizophrenic human/societal state of being "caught" between cultures. He

acknowledges Derek Walcott's The Arkansas Testament (1987) for provid ing him with the terms, "Here and Elsewhere". Walcott's collection sorts

poems about the Caribbean into a section entitled, "Here"; and poems from or about America fall into the category of "Elsewhere".

Guinness, by way of introducing his own book, addresses the thematic

importance of Walcott's terminology and the use of the "Here/Elsewhere" construct as the structural and organizing principal in his essays. He writes: "Such a dichotomy between the local and the alien, the inward-looking and the exploratory-of-far horizons, is latent or explicit in all of these essays and

gives them whatever unity they have" (xi). Unfortunately, Guinness ig nores many of the critical pitfalls of constructing fixed, absolutist binary oppositions in order to analytically discuss non-Western literatures. In serious collections of poetry and prose, dichotomous/oppositional terms

usually take on their own meanings; but, these meanings shift depending on the reader's ability to fill crucial "gaps" that, while absent, nevertheless

punctuate the text.

Consider the marvellously open-ended conclusion to Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John:

I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth.

Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with

liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out.

Kincaid's remarkable employment of metaphor and analogy creates an

atmosphere that very much exemplifies what Donette Francis has termed,

112 Journal of West Indian Literature



"linguistic violence". But what is truly euphoric about Kincaid s concluding analogy is its interpretive possibilities. Could we not argue that this sym bolic "vessel" presents the reader with a plethora of theoretical and critical avenues with which to interpret Annie's departure: the last post of Annie's

physically realized Antiguan life? We could read this metaphor as a crucial

representative vehicle: Annie's sense of her own body being emptied of an

oppressive history; the beginnings of a feminist voyage for new traditions that are not born of theft or penetration; or, a unique plea to be, once and for all, in a position to make "history" that is not prescribed or predestined by the rules of an imperial curricula: its social, moral and spiritual values; its destructive gendered/racial boundaries.

The point is that the activity of literary interpretation hinges on our abilities to process, divine and celebrate some form or shape of "meaning" out of the construction and presentation of poetic and prosaic language. Thinking, talking and arguing about Kincaid's work provides an excellent

example of such engagements. Literature allows us the freedom to interpret and debate ideas and this is truly one of its precious gifts but, in a book of

criticism, the same doesn't always apply. In Guinness' collection of critical

essays, what we are given to "chew on" is very little: an analysis of the thematics of the "Here/Elsewhere" opposition that lacks expansion, in novation or insight. Once again, Afro-Asian Atlantic readers, scholars and students must contend with a conservative, cursory recapitulation of "our"

so-called "identity crisis"; and, once again, we must read about our very own "internal schisms"; anachronistically treated as a generic condition that assaults the spirits, minds and bodies of all displaced peoples. Guinness' book confirms the rumour that the violences of universalist/absolutist criticism are still fertile and multiplying. He pays very little attention to the

ways in which the "Here/Elsewhere" confrontation affects, very different

ly, those of us who now own those personal and public post-colonized/post-enslaved/post-indentured "spaces" that are the

physical/spiritual reminders of brutal and incendiary history; those of us

who, at the very least, are searching for and creating strategies of cultural,

spiritual, economic and social re/memberment and re/possession. Guinness argues that, while the "Here/Elsewhere embrace" has always

been a "problematic one", this "condition" still offers our writers "remark able compensations":

To live Here, physically or in one's imagination, and yet to have to cope with the constant push and pull of Elsewhere concentrates the mind

wonderfully. The Here/Elsewhere embrace also gives writers a mag

Vol. 7, No. 1 U3



nificent theme, which is how different cultures interact and modify one another in a situation which, by its nature, must be multicultural (xii).

According to Guinness, this has been the case with those writers he chooses to discuss in his book: V.S, Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Derek Walcott, all from the English-speaking Caribbean; Luis Pales Matos and Luis

Raphael Sanchez, both from Puerto Rico; as well as overviews of other

important works of fiction from the Spanish speaking Caribbean. What Guinness fails to consider, however, in much of the fiction he responds to, is the fact that many times it is impossible to lay claim to any fixed sense of a "Here/Elsewhere" because, in all of those sites/places of discursive/iden

tity-making, there are always traces of both "spaces": the most obvious of

these spaces is that of the novel and its language, "chutnified", to quote Salman Rushdie, by our own writers.

New World narratives written in imperial languages, are, in many cases, "chutnifiecT/creolized re/inventions of Europe's colonizing cultural and intellectual productions; indeed, we could argue that born out of these historical collisions is the invention of original cultural phenomena: Guyanese creolize, Antillean calypsoes, Jamaican mento, reggae and dan cehall: a proliferation of seminal linguistic, musical and dramatic modes, forms and styles. Importantly, these cross-cultural subversions travel when

we physically travel to the geographical "elsewheres" we choose to inhabit. We live the "Here/Elsewhere" within us; both have parented us; they cannot be easily separated to feed the business of superfluous, Euro-centric

literary theory. Thus, the whole concept of a "Here/Elsewhere" is a per petually shifting one; elusive to many of us due to the fact that it, in itself, is a product of a dubious, regional cross-culturality.

Even in our literature, these lessons are taught: one can never success

fully escape the "Here" into an "Elsewhere" because we are both, we live

both, we own both. Take, for example, the following two Caribbean novels, both documents of migration from a Caribbean "Here" into a Western,

geographical "Elsewhere": Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and George

Lamming's In The Castle of My Skin. These writings raise the very same

issues I've just amplified; that we cannot escape the "Here" because, cul

turally, spiritually and aesthetically, it travels with us into the "Elsewhere".

And yet, Guinness, in his discussion of Puerto Rican artist Luis Matos and

St Lucian poet and dramatist, Derek Walcott, maintains that literature has

offered both writers the opportunity "of escaping from Here into Else

where" (1). He is, of course, referring to those imaginative doors into other

worlds that literature can offer the writer; and also, like Walcott and

Naipaul, success in literature can offer the artist an adoring audience and




lucrative career in America or Europe. While this is true, what Guinness fails to discuss is the fact that, even if the artist is living in the so-called

"Elsewhere", most times his language and creative energies are invested in the process of imaginatively returning to a respective "homeland" through the magic of lucid, painful but profound artistic images of home. Thus, we are talking about a cultural/spiritual fusion of all the "places" and "spaces" which the Caribbean person, simultaneously possessed and dispossessed, occupies.

There is always an inescapable blurring of the physical and the spiritual: the "Here/Elsewhere" exists on all levels and all planes and can never be

neatly defined as an inner/outer, local/alien phenomenon. Any notion of a dichotomous, unchanging "Here/Elsewhere" opposition is doomed to

collapse. I offer two examples of the inevitable fission of such a theory: first, Lorna Goodison's "Heartease New England 1987", and Derek Walcott's meditation on the Trinidadian town of Felicity in his Nobel lecture, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.

Goodison's poem addresses many different emotions, experiences and themes. Most striking, however, is the poem's articulation of mutual and consensual discovery: journeys of inner peace and healing and the pos sibilities of this occurring through a heightened human awareness of the interconnectedness between people and the universe. The unravelling and

mystery of signs and their meanings; art and its connection to salvation; the

powers of the soul and of the heart. Goodison is keenly aware of the

importance of language and text - in all of its forms, oral and scribal - as amulets that can bring and celebrate the victories of cultural and spiritual repossession. Through art, song and meditation, for the migrant living in the West, in "Elsewhere", the "Here" is never absent. Such is the message in the following quotation from "Heartease New England 1987":

I see an African in Harvard Square. He is telling himself a story as he walks in telling it, he takes all the parts and I see that he has taken himself home.

The importance of this experience is obvious: it is one of possession, of ecstatic invasion, of what is natural and nurturing to the very heart and soul of being. Goodison's African student is literally telling himself back

home, a space which is now an "Elsewhere" and, Harvard, now an imme diate "Here": still, he occupies the spiritual 'here" of home through the

orality of quiet story-telling while walking the concrete of a geographical "elsewhere". Therefore, he is positioned in both "spaces"; both for the

Vol. 7, No.l 215



moment belong to him; both are fused in the historical/material reality of his travelling/talking body. In the final analysis, he represents a fusion of all possible "heres" and "elsewheres".

Similarly, in his Nobel Lecture, Walcott discovers an old world alive and vibrant in the contexts of a "new world" spiritual/religious dramatic

performance. In doing so, Walcott not only collapses the notion of a generic thematic opposition between "Here/Elsewhere"; but, also, explodes the entire notion of an academic, high discourse on the dramatic and theatrical. I am referring to Walcott's observation of the village Of Felicity's com

munity-produced performance of The Ramayana. This adaptation, in

Walcott's reading, emerges as a stirring example of trans-geographical Indian religious/spiritual/cultural traditions; an ancient, old world text

staged in the natural environment of the New World. Hence, a historical connection to an "old India" that, while it can only be imagined, is still very much energized, and celebrated through the reading and dramatization of one of its travelling texts. Walcott is underlining the ways in which cross

cultural/historical links are preserved through the transformative powers of artistic expression: thus, the violence of the colonial encounter has not

completely severed the Indo-Caribbean diaspora from its ancestral origins. As a result, the performance/interpretation of the ancient Ramayana is

not merely a dramatization but, more powerfully, a celebration and ar

ticulation of "faith", ancient and enduring. There are always, then, existing routes into ancestral "Elsewheres" open to diasporic peoples. Walcott's

example depicts a cultural fact that is much more than just another "event"

but is, rather, a performance that is historically informed like those other ancient Indian rituals, dramas, celebrations and stories still alive in the West Indies.

The experience of "Here and Elsewhere", therefore, takes many different

forms-physical, theatrical, spiritual. There are several provocative issues with respect to this experience that Guinness is unable to address, such as: "where does a "Here" and an "Elsewhere" begin and end as definable

regions?"; "is "Here" only the realm of the "inward" and "Elsewhere" a

"space" for the "exploratory-of-far-horizons?" What about individuals who

are subjected to a sense of topological division, caught between worlds, the one they claim as "home", (the space which they have been taught to define

as birth/place, spirit/place); and that "other" place (England, Canada,

America), usually a Western destination, fraught with harsh temperatures, soul/less inhabitants, institutionalized policies of racism and segregation and economic hardship.

216 journal of West Indian Literature



This brings me to my second point of contention with Here and Elsewhere:

Essays on Caribbean Literature which is that Guinness fails to even success

fully relate these issues to a text which, for many of us encapsulates the

growing relevance and significance of colonial exile and marronage: Jean

Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Instead, Guinness, as is evident in his chapters on Puerto Rican literature, entitled, "Positive and Negative Images in Puerto Rican Fiction" and Derek Walcott, entitled "Here and Elsewhere, II", is more interested in applying to literary works and their creators crude

psychoanalytical/biographical assessments in order to challenge the artis tic and creative value of these works.

I am not trying to suggest that Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys or Rene

Marques have created artistic works that are flawless; or, because of the

place they might hold in an emerging repertoire of Caribbean literary "greats", be exonerated from critical interrogation. What is disappointing is that Guinness is unable to create a reflective and useful debate. He descends into the notion that he can access a provocative, healthy analysis of fiction through the rather dubious and frightening task of assuming and

inscribing onto the text authorial intention. The chapter on Jean Rhys, rather excitingly titled, "Another Look at Jean

Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea", marks such a digression: it does not offer progres sive, new criticism on this fundamental text. What this chapter really seems to be doing is attempting a rescue mission, a rather defensive one at that, of the men that appear in Jean Rhys' fiction. Guinness believes that Rhys, especially in Wide Sargasso Sea, fails in creating fluid, balanced portraits of men because she has no idea of what a man is; this inability he attributes to the fact that Rhys "can only create the subjectivity of characters who are in some way versions of herself" (88). As a result, when the reader comes to "Rochester's" voice in Wide Sargasso Sea, "there is nothing...to get hold of: his motivations are elusive, his moods unpredictable, his character curious

ly unstable" (102). Guinness believes that this signifies that "Rochester" is an inconsistent and flawed character assassinated by Rhys herself because she needs him to function simply as the "cold and factual" villain to the

"emotional", victimized heroine.

Ignoring Rhys' intertextual project in Wide Sargasso Sea as really a

fantasy in the minds of previous critics (re: the criticism of the "extra

literary" (85) which he believes "flattens" an analysis of the text), Guinness fails to identify the textual fact that Rhys' characters are ironically self

reflexive, in both action and statement, thus, implying the "extra-literary"; namely, there is a profound awareness of destinies already confirmed;

Vol. 7, No. 1 117



long as there are readers, converge in another

What is attributed as evidence to support the belief that Rhys charac terization of "Rochester" is incoherent and inconsistent (I am talking here about Guinness' attempts to sort out "Rochester's real attitude to An

toinette") emerges, rather, as a testament to the narrative genius of Rhys. Guinness seems to feel that "Rochester's" shifting feelings toward An

toinette, through an analysis of what he says about loving her, from pages 84 through to 93, exemplifies Rhys' inability to craft, successfully, "her other

protagonist" (103). After all, according to Guinness, employing a nascent form of psychoanalytical criticism, Rhys "can create Antoinette...because it is so closely based on the pattern of psychic dependence in her own life" but when it comes to "Rochester", "She can only stumble" because he is

"obviously not Ford Maddox Ford" (103). In succumbing to this sort of analysis, it is Guinness, himself, who

stumbles, committing a serious misreading of the relationship between

spoken dialogue and psychological markers in Wide Sargasso Sea: he cannot see that Rhys uses dialogue, rather than an intrusive, Euro-centric-styled narrator, to articulate psychic movement, awareness and turmoil in the minds and souls of her characters, especially and including "Rochester".

Rhys is slowly, in Part Two of her novel, bringing "Rochester" face to face with his "lot", his own "destiny" to, in turn, deliver Antoinette into her

predestined role as symbolic madwoman in a canonical text, Jane Eyre; he

will drag her to her "death" in another country, another house, another text. The chapters on Walcott and on Puerto Rican Fiction feature similar

examples of an uneven, hodge-podge of different employing critical, theoretical and stylistic modes that are never are rarely convincing or

necessary. Most disturbing is Guinness' opinion of contemporary Puerto Rican literature which he assesses and evaluates almost entirely in relation to Western canonical literature. He seems to feel that the function of "great" literature is to "define the national character and provide readers with

patterns for imitation" (44) and that, because Puerto Rican fiction has failed to do so, it is not "great". Essentially, what Guinness wants is for writers like Rene Marques to lie about the material/economic reality of life in Puerto Rico. He wants these artists to betray a politicized imagination in favour of a universalized outlook on the world, encapsulated neatly in the action and speeches of a "Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust" (43).

Puerto Rican fiction has none of these positive figures, according to

Guinness, but it is full of negative images. He attacks Puerto Rican fiction,

especially Marques' work, for debasing, stereotyping and reducing the




North American to "a being of insatiable sexual appetite (45). What Guin ness ignores is the incredible artistic brilliance of those very same novels dismisses. Firstly, the politico-literary tropes of parody, caricature and satire in Jose Luis Gonzalez's novel La Llegada and Pedro Juan Soto's Un

oscuropueblo sonriente are completely overlooked in Guinness' analysis. For

instance, in taking offence to the representation of white American men, the gringos, in both of these texts, the function of these characters as parodic caricature completely escapes Guinness' critical eye: these gringos are both literal and symbolic; they represent a dangerous discursive force in Puerto Rican society. Historically, the gringo, like it or not, is the histori

cal/material rupture responsible for the disintegration of

communal/nativist wholeness. Guinness also misreads the dialogue and conversation in Marques s

ingenious, La mirada as being reflective of the writer's belief in the "rapa cious and hopelessly promiscuous" nature of the North American.

However, the quotation Guinness cites, as is the-case with the textual evidence he also chooses in support of his arguments concerning Wide

Sargasso Sea, does him a critical disservice and back-fires. The selection, instead, emerges as a fine example of Marques' innovation and creativity as a political satirist. What we have in the quoted dialogue (44-45) is an

exemplary piece of dead-pan/soul-less conversation a la American

television/Hollywood productions. When Marques' embellishes the im

ages of North Americans as "oversexed", sexist, racist and tasteless, he is indeed waging an astute interrogation of the ways in which American

popular culture sells itself to the world; through an on-going spectacle of "free" decadence, immorality and impunity. How can the Puerto Rican writer be blamed for stereotyping a culture that is famous for stereotyping itself; that thrives and survives, commercially and economically, on the

manufacturing of superfluous and inept images of nationality and in

digenity? Finally, there is the chapter on Derek Walcott which, like all of the other

chapters, including those on Luis Rafael Sanchez and V.S. Naipaul (chap ters not discussed in this review but bearing many of the same flaws as the other explorations in the compilation), attempts an overview at a wide

range of the artist's work. And, again like the other critical treatments, Guinness ends up offering only cursory, superficially analyzed samplings of entire poems and stanzas, most of which are taken out of context. Guinness' real agenda iri this chapter is to prove to his reader that:

Walcott is a maddeningly uneven writer and to read him demands repeated acts of discrimination between poetic

Vol. 7, No. 1 119



shafts that land square on the bull's-eye and those that go off quivering into the empyrean (171)

According to Guinness, Walcott is a confused writer because, on the one

hand, our Nobel Laureate writes "strongly and simply"; but, on the other, he can muster nothing up but turgid writing with "a numbing air of

pretension" (147). Of course, Guinness offers examples of what he terms the "Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde" syndrome in Walcott's writing. But, once again, we run into theoretical problems of a serious kind.

Guinness cites two quotations from Walcott (147-148); one, showing the excellent "Dr. Jekyll"; the other, a dastardly "Mr. Hyde". The muddle with Guinness' analysis this time, however, does not lie in a misreading or

misinterpretation of the narrative strategies implicit in the text but, rather, of context; namely, Guinness' refusal to recognize that what he offers as

examples of the "Here/Elsewhere"/"Dr.Jekyll/Mr.Hyde" conditions are

actually paragraphs that have been completely ripped out of context. For

example, what Guinness believes to be reflective of Walcott's strong, simple writing style is taken from a piece that requires a language of gentleness, spiced with lucid memory and elucidation; Walcott is, after all, talking about the influence of birthplace on artistic style and performance (147). In the selection that is unfairly condemned as pompous and over-the-top, Walcott is discussing something that warrants the employment of large, grand, epic language: the issue is the enormity of literary trans-cultural

legacies and ancestries; as Walcott puts it: "the common experience of the

New World". Thus, Guinness pays no attention to the relationship between

textual language and purpose: the role of words, specific and carefully chosen images, in the construction and presentation of a writing's theme and tone.

It seems to me that Guinness has been dangerously romanced by Arnoldian notion that Western literary productions should be read as

precious "touchstones"; Guinness seems to feel that Caribbean literature must be evaluated against such canonical writings, namely the English and Russian novels of the last four centuries. The final sentence of his chapter on Puerto Rican literature provides a stirring example of such a dysfunc tion. Guinness writes: "Contemporary Puerto Rican literature still awaits its Eugene Onegin and Jane Eyre." It does not occur to Guinness that maybe Puerto Rico needs and wants a different kind of national literature; after all, there is the very real fact that art is a transformative response to certain

experiences. So, why would modern Puerto Rico even desire texts such as those that Guinness cites?




Thus, Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature ends up offering the English Caribbean reader/student/critic very little illumination and

amplification, not only of the wonders and complexities of Spanish Carib bean writing, an area of literature that, judging from the biographical notes

accompanying the book, Guinness knows a great deal about, but, also, of the legacies of Anglo-Caribbean fiction. The Caribbean has not, with this

publication, found a new collection of vigilant, creative and relevant

literary essays about its literature. Instead, we are treated to a series of

polemical meditations, masquerading as criticism, that rely solely on al lusions to "high" literary language, terms and anecdotes for stylistic back-up.1

Notes

It remains a mystery to me why foreign' critics continue to be fixated on the more well-known Caribbean writers from the first and second crea tive waves of the fifties and sixties, and ignore the more recent literary workers who are producing documents more relevant to our current

experiences. Where are Kincaid, Phillips, Cliff, Craig, Brodber, Goodison, Pollard, Collins, Brand, Dabydeen in the "Here/Elsewhere" investigation? And, if we must stay with "old giants", where are Austin Clarke's Toronto stories, Mittelholzer's tragic and sensual romps, Roy K. Heath's touching and resonant novels, and Wilson Harris'

groundbreaking odysseys? Faizal Forrester

Sincere apologies to our faithful subscribers for the long delay in the appearance of Vol. 7, No.l.

We have been undergoing re-organisation and this contributed to the delay. You will see that from now on all_subscriptions and

inquiries will be handled by The Press, UWI, 2A Aqueduct Road, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica.

Only editorial matters are to be sent to UWl, Cave Hill, Barbados as always.

- The Editors

Vol. 7, No. 1 121



Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature by Gerald Guinness

Documents

Transcript of Here and Elsewhere: Essays on Caribbean Literature by Gerald Guinness